Anyone who says the US has a good healthcare system has never used it.
@MookyTroubadour The US has great healthcare if you can afford it. The quality degrades proportionally to your ability to pay. I'm not arguing with you, here. Just making a point about quality vs availability. It's not that we don't have it, it's just that it's rationed to the rich.
@Ironworker229 I disagree. I have exceptional insurance and cash in hand, am in pain, and can’t be seen for three weeks. The ER is the only functional part of the whole thing, and they’re wickedly overloaded. It’s absurd.
@MookyTroubadour Not trying to minimize your experience, because it sounds fucked up and I wish it were better for you. I'm just giving a different perspective because my limited experiences for myself and my family have ranged from not great to pretty good.
@Ironworker229 the Seattle/Tacoma area is really awful. For a number of years I had decent care from one hospital network, and then all the docs just left. It was very strange. I then went to another which may have been okay at some point, but by the time I tried them out was abysmal. Now I’m on a third, which is slower than Christmas for every last little thing. Did Covid do all this? Maybe. I have limited data. Are there remaining good options? Not in Tacoma anyway. Maybe I can scrape up enough cash to buy a Canadian residency and social services entry. I bet that’s pricey. This is not how I figured my life would be at this juncture.
@Ironworker229 if it was just me, I’d probably shut up and just suffer through it, but my girlie is having a similar or worse time with ongoing and serious undiagnosed and untreated medical maladies as well. It hurts extra when someone you love can’t get the care they need or deserve.
@MookyTroubadour Ugh! Sounds like the whole ecosystem in your area has been going through some things for awhile. Sorry that y'all are stuck with it.
@MookyTroubadour I suspect that there's a very prominent regional component at work, too. I had a health emergency last year and went to the ER in San Diego, about 20 minutes away. I had a bed in 20 minutes. I received, as far as I can tell, quality care under my union health plan with Kaiser Permanente and was in the hospital for 3 days. I could nit-pick a few things, but overall as good of an experience as could be hoped for.